Reason and reflection, discussion and critical" target="_blank" title="a.批评的；关键性的">critical judgment, tell one
that he is not quite there.

Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his
versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not

the microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts,
which tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the

very heart from the victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's
poetry has our love; his lines murmur in our memory through all the

stress and accidents of life. "The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann,"
"Switzerland," the melancholymajesty of the close of "Sohrab and

Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred graves
beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and thunder

of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;"
these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest

hour when life herself ceases to "moan round with many voices."
My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too

didactic, that he protests too much, and considers too curiously,
that his best poems are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable

thoughts." It may be so; but he carries us back to "wet, bird-
haunted English lawns;" like him "we know what white and purple

fritillaries the grassyharvest of the river yields," with him we
try to practiseresignation, and to give ourselves over to that

spirit
"Whose purpose is not missed,

While life endures, while things subsist."
Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his

generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when
nature does for him what his "lutin" did for Corneille, "takes the

pen from his hand and writes for him." But he has none of the
creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey."

He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He
can give a natural and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient

imaginings, as to "these bright and ancient snakes, that once were
Cadmus and Harmonia."

Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to
us "breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even

the Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and
Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that

beautiful song in "Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of
sculpture and the charm of the purest colour. It is full of the

silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of the loch's
dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the heather, and

the wet tresses of the birch.
Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the

fountains of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a
clogged and stony channel. And who is there to succeed the two who

are gone, or who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That
is a melancholy question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt

and dread enough) in my next letter. {1}
OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an
American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. The

singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put
forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapaest or trochee,

or whatever it may be. My information goes further, and declares
that there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired

Americans.
This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very

dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day.
Eighteen is long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden,

in "Old Mortality," tells us that three to one are odds as long as
ever any warrior met victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal

Raddlebanes.
I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the

eighteen of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to
speak about three living poets, in addition to those masters treated

of in my last letter. Two of the three you will have guessed at--
Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William Morris. The third, I dare say, you do

not know even by name. I think he is not one of the English
eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges. His muse has followed the epicurean

maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, fallentis semita vitae, where
the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan berries droop

in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort. But you will find her
all the fresher for her country ways.

My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far
away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I

remember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St.
Andrews, looking across the bay to the sunset, while some one

repeated "Two Red Roses across the Moon." And I remember thinking
that the poem was nonsense. With Mr. Morris's other early verses,

"The Defence of Guinevere," this song of the moon and the roses was
published in 1858. Probably the little book won no attention; it is

not popular even now. Yet the lyrics remain in memories which
forget all but a general impression of the vast "Earthly Paradise,"

that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men,
and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palaces are all

mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the
wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these

persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint,
and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the

characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere" are people of
flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the

trappings of their tabards.
There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris's old

Oxford days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him,
with all its contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest

desire to enjoy this life to the full in war and love, or to make
certain of a future in which war is not, and all love is pure

heavenly. If one were to choose favourites from "The Defence of
Guinevere," they would be the ballads of "Shameful Death," and of

"The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind," which has the wind's
wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of "Porphyria's Lover" in

its burden.
The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and

happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the
scarlet roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make

the poem a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-
rover, the slayer of his lady, in "The Wind":

"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind
It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the

wind;
On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;

If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,
And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar,

And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war."
"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some

drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic
manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-

60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were
undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire

these strange things, though "The Haystack in the Floods," with its
tragedy, must surely appeal to all who read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr.
Morris's long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were

less art than "art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and
erroneous sentiment. "The Earthly Paradise," and still more

certainly "Jason," are full of such pleasure as only poetry can
give. As some one said of a contemporarypolitician, they are

"good, but copious." Even from narrativepoetry Mr. Morris has long
abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold's parable of

"The Progress of Poetry."
"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."

Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title
seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had